Lionel Davis
South Africa
Bio
Lionel Davis was born in District Six, Cape Town on 21 June 1936. His family was among those displaced from their homes as a result of apartheid’s Group Areas Act. After the forced removals in the 1960s, Davis was imprisoned on Robben Island as a political prisoner from 1964 to 1971 followed by five years under house arrest. In 1978, at the age of 42, he began his formal art education at the Community Arts Project (CAP)(1) in Cape Town. He then continued his education at the Evangelical Arts and Crafts Centre at Rorke’s Drift(2) in Kwazulu Natal. Davis graduated with a degree in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1994.
Davis’ artistic practice mirrors certain chapters within his life: growing up in District Six; imprisonment on Robben Island; his time at the Community Arts Project in Cape Town; and his time with Thupelo Workshops (3) (which was considered to be one of Davis’s ‘artistic homes’). Davis is also well-known for working across a multiplicity of artistic media: drawing, painting, print-making, collage and experimenting with mixed media.
In working across, between, and within a variety of differing media and styles, Davis has disregarded the limitations of singular mediums. His work is informed by the idea of learning. Davis is less concerned about traditional ideas of developing skills than he is about growth, whereby a link between the creative act and a quest for consciousness is made.
Davis’s work also is also located within the context of the reconstruction of a community displaced and destroyed by apartheid, rendering the work inherently political. Here, to quote from an article by Mario Pissara in ART AFRICA magazine, Davis’s politics are “manifest through his empathy for people dealing with the challenges of being alive, being hungry, being depressed or just coping, passing time, waiting…”.
